Friday, December 07, 2007

Edvance Report Blasts the State Center on Its Pre-K School Readiness Initiative: Says the Center's Budget is Not Transparent and Shows the Center has Spent 40% -- $8.6 million of Your Taxpayer Dollars -- for Its Own Internal Administrative Expenses

Last Spring, I testified in Austin on Senate Bill 50 and my concerns about the State Center, operated by Dr. Susan Landry, at the UT Health Science Center in Houston. The State Center has created a pre-K curriculum that it has been selling to school districts throughout Texas. I believe that one of the problems with the State Center's curriculum is that it has not been subject to any review to determine success by any outside group. In addition, there has been a push to impose the State Center's curriculum on Districts like Spring Branch, despite the outstanding success enjoyed by our program.

During the Spring, one of the things that the State Center highlighted in its favor was that it would be independently reviewed by Edvance with a report to be made publicly available by early Fall 2007.

I have been asking for the Edvance report for several months, and have been told by the State Center that the report was not available and/or had not been approved, and this despite the fact that $375,000 taxpayer dollars were allocated for the report. Indeed, as of today, I am unaware of anyplace (other than this blog post) where you can easily obtain a copy of this report.

I finally obtained the report from another source and have now had the chance to review its contents.

The report is dated October 26, 2007, further calling into question the delay in releasing it to the public.

The report is a large file that I have broken down into the following parts which can be downloaded for your review: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4.

The headline from the report should be this quote taken from page 91:

Presently the State Center operates in the netherworld of state finance; the
budget of the State Center is not transparent, expenditures and performance are
not recapitulated for policy makers and a key and growing public school program
is being operated not out of the Texas Education Agency but a medical school in
Houston, Texas

This quote is especially troubling when you consider that the State Center has had $78 million allocated to its Pre-K readiness program in the last 4 years. Of that amount, the Center has spent only $21.8 million with fully 40% of those funds totaling $8.6 million of taxpayer dollars on its own administration, i.e., none of that money reached a classroom.

On the expenditure side, the report further condemns the State Center for its failure to identify its expenditures in a manner that would allow for a cost allocation analysis. It is impossible to determine how your tax dollar is being spent. As an aside, the State Center reports that it has paid employee benefits that total approximately 21% of each employees salary.

The report further states: TEEM
communities have received very little funds (in the form of cash) since the
inception of the TEEM initiative. With $21.8 million already spent, this is a very surprising revelation.

Equally problematic is that the report found no statistically significant benefit from the State Center in terms of student improvement.

In addition, one of the principal concerns I had in the Spring is that the State Center has developed the test to determine whether its own program is successful, yet it has refused to share the methodology it uses for that test with the public. As a result, the data sources for the Edvance report, all of which has come from State Center data, is highly suspect given the Center's lack of transparency.

Finally, on August 31, 2007, I posted about my concern that the State Center's model is the equivalent of high stakes testing for 4 and 5 year olds. The report does nothing to alleviate this concern, and indeed, the amount of money flowing (inefficiently) through the State Center, and its lack of public visibility and scrutiny only serve to enhance this problem.

I have submitted the following questions to Dr. Landry at the State Center, but have not yet received a response. I will post the responses to these questions once they are received.

Please disregard my prior request concerning the Edvance report on TEEM.
I have obtained a copy of the report from another source.

I would like to give you the opportunity to respond to the
following issues raised by the report:

1. The Cost Description (Chapter 3), states that the State Center
has been awarded $78m over four years and spent $21.8m. What is the intended
use of the remaining balance?

2. Why were the 2006-2007 applications for the TEEM program not
available for the evaluation team to review (page 31)?

3. Why has the State Center not identified specific cost drivers
so a cost allocation model can be developed (page 44)?

4. How are the faculty and classified salaries, other wages, benefits,
operating expenses, and indirect costs allocated to the individual TEEM
classrooms (page 44)? If they are not currently allocated, why
not?

5. The expenditure category (Chapter 3, page 47) shows State
Center General Operating expenditures of $8.59m over FY 2004-1/31/07 which
represents approximately 40% of the total expended by the State Center. Is this
accurate?

6. Is the report accurate when it states on page 48 that "TEEM
communities have received very little funds (in the form of cash) since the
inception of the TEEM initiative?

7. Is the TBRS referenced throughout the report for both teacher and
student evaluation publicly available? Are the performance measurements
publicly available?

8. Do you agree with the report on page 70 where it states "There was
only one instance . . . in which the difference was significant for the overall
sample, and no instances in which the English subsample yielded significant
results?

9. Do you agree with the report on page 73 where it states regarding
teacher behavior variables that "None of the findings were statistically
significant . . . ."

10. Is it accurate to say that the data in the report based on the
TBRS comes from the evaluation instrument developed internally by the State
Center to judge the success of the TEEM model?

11. Do you agree with the report on page 76 where it states that "For
Math Activities and Phonological Awareness Activities, although there were no
statistically significant differences in gains, both had small negative effect
sizes?

12. Does the State Center report "unique student identifiers" to any
outside third parties (as suggested on page 84)?

13. Is the report accurate when it states that the second year did not
include a true control group? If so, why is that the case?

14. Do you agree with the report on page 91 where it states "Presently
the State Center operates in the netherworld of state finance; the budget of the
State Center is not transparent, expenditures and performance are not
recapitulated for policy makers and a key and growing public school program is
being operated not out of the Texas Education Agency but a medical school in
Houston, Texas? If so, why is the State Center's budget not transparent, and
readily available to the public for scrutiny and inspection?

15. In Appendix B the report references datasets provided by the State
Center. Where/how was this data collected?

16. Is there longitudinal student data for the students who
participated in Year 1 or Year 2, and if so, why was that data not utilized in
the report?

17. Why was the Edvance
report, which is dated October 26, 2007, not widely disseminated at the time of
publication?

18. Is there anything else you would like to add concerning the
Edvance report and its findings?